Rare won’t fix Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts for SDTVs

You know, they’re called Standard Definition TVs for a reason. The videogame industry has been quick to jump on the Hi-Def bandwagon, regardless of the fact that SDTVs are still the, y’know, standard, and Rare has made a clear example of this with the ridiculously tiny text in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.

Despite Nuts & Bolts following in the footsteps of Dead Rising by practically excluding SDTV owners, Rare has stated that the barely legible text seen in the BK demo will likely be exactly the same text seen at retail.

“Unfortunately, this is an issue that doesn’t look like it will get changed. I don’t want to bore you with the technical side of things (I really don’t understand it all myself), but the long and the short of it is that the text you see in the demo will be the same as that which you find in the retail version of the game,” stated Rare community manager George Kelion.  “I’m sorry that we weren’t able to address this issue as nothing would please us more than turning all your complaints into gleeful responses, but it’s simply something that’s too expensive in terms of time, resources and money to alter.

“Please don’t kill me. This *doesn’t* mean we don’t care about or respect the community. This *does* mean that, when all’s said and done, we’re only human.” 

I don’t know about anyone else, but I found the text was too small even on an HDTV. I had to walk across the room to get close enough to read it, and that’s not cool — especially for a game that relies on text for all its dialog and tutorials. I don’t play videogames to stand a foot away from a screen and squint.